Who

Wandering The Wasteland

We’ve all been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately. I had not decided to write
anything about until now for a couple of reasons. First, I am lazy. Second, I
think that if I like a game, I should give it a chance to become hateful
before I write down how much I like it. Hating a game is different. If a game
sucks in the first few hours, it hardly ever gets
better.

So, Fallout 3 is good. Here are a couple of reasons why.

First, a short digression. One of my favorite games of all time is the first
2/3rds of Half-Life. Before you go to the psycho alien parallel universe
disco, it was as pure a wonderful shooty experience as could be had before the
year 2000. Of course, then it got hateful.

One of my favorite things to do in Half-Life was to sneak around with the
crossbow. The trick was to creep carefully around a level and stay just
outside the trigger radius of the creatures so they would not attack. Then I’d
zoom in with the scope and thunk; one shot kill. This never got old.

Fallout 3 is the first game in memory to bring back this wonderful mechanic.
Let me explain. The regular combat system in Fallout is much like
Obvlivion where you can run up to the creatures and beat on them in real
time. Happily, for those of use who are old, slow and uncoordinated, they have
also implemented a system they call V.A.T.S. which is “turn based”.

What you get to do in V.A.T.S. is methodically target your weapon on whatever
part of the enemy you wish to cripple. You can queue up a limited number of
shots based on yoru character’s abilities. Time stands still while you do
this, so you don’t have to worry about any embarrassing death while you think.
Then you hit a button and your character unleashes hot lead in a perfectly
choreographed slow motion bad-ass bullet time mini-cut scene, and your enemies
die in horribly graphic ways.

It’s great.

More importantly, you can sneak up on enemies and do this to them.
Therefore, Bethesda has inadvertently built a system that does an uncanny
simulation of my favorite activity from Half-Life. Bravo. I could, and have,
spend dozens of hours doing this.

There is a lot more to like about this game though. They have streamlined and
fixed the leveling systems from Oblivion and made them much less min-maxy.
The art and environmental design is for the most part spectacular. Although
the endless subway stations sometimes seem too much the same. As is usual in
Bethesda games, the world is full of delicious bite sized quests which you can
do or leave alone at your whim.

Some may accuse Bethsoft of “merely” creating “Oblivion with guns”, a charge
that always confused me because it assumes that such a thing would be a bad
deal. I think a more accurate statement would be that they have created a
much improved and polished version of something like Oblivion, but in a more
interesting setting and with better game mechanics. Not a bad thing at all.

And yet, many of the standard Bethesda problems remain:

1. Main quest is not as interesting as the rest of the world: CHECK.

2. Dramatic cut scenes populated by animatronic robots: CHECK.

3. Creepy, almost inhuman face animation during dialog: CHECK.

4. Dialog trees full of the same expository text over and over again: CHECK.

The quality of the dialog and character development is something of a mixed
bag, varying from great to completely pedestrian. Bethesda seems to be at
their best when they set up a short and sweet sidequest that is narratively
contained and doesn’t require a lot of back story. My observation has been
that the longer the quest goes, the more likely I am to feel bored near the
end.

But overall I can’t complain too much. I have played more than two dozen hours
and only a small amount of that time has felt perfunctory or tedious. I’ve
seen a lot of commentary on the internet boards this week that can be summed
up as:

“Man, this game starts to get old after you plow sixty hours into it, Bethesda
really don’t know what they are doing.”

There seems to be a strange mental disease that infects the hard core gamer
set that allows them to convince themselves that they have hated a game even
though they played it for more time than they spend working in a week. These
people are, of course, insane. If you play any game for multiple tens of
hours, you have no right to claim you didn’t like it. Any rational being would
give up on something they don’t like before the ten hour mark.

Happily, you will not have this problem with Fallout 3. The game is filled
with a ton of content and will reward you if you wander around and seek it
out. I say go ahead. You’ve got nothing to lose.